PostHog vs Grafana Cloud
Open source product analytics — all-in-one dev tool
vs. Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana
Pricing tiers
PostHog
Free (generous)
No credit card. Each product has its own free monthly quota. Great for startups + OSS.
Free
Paid (usage-based)
Pay only what you use, after free quotas. Volume discounts at higher tiers. 6 projects, 7-year retention.
$0 base (usage-based)
Self-Hosted (OSS)
MIT-licensed. Run on your own infra via Docker/k8s. Zero vendor lock-in.
$0 base (usage-based)
Enterprise
Custom. SAML SSO, dedicated CSM, custom SLA.
Custom
Grafana Cloud
Free
Always free. 10k metrics series + 50 GB logs/traces/profiles + 3 users + 14-day retention.
Free
Self-Hosted (OSS)
Apache 2.0 / AGPL. Run Grafana + Mimir + Loki + Tempo yourself.
$0 base (usage-based)
Pro
$19/mo platform fee + usage-based overages. 10k metrics series + 50 GB included. 13-month metrics retention.
$19/mo
Enterprise
$25,000/year minimum. Custom retention, premium support, BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) option.
$25000/mo
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on PostHog vs free on Grafana Cloud.
| Metric | PostHog | Grafana Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| data warehouse rows | 1000000 rows/month | — |
| error tracking exceptions | 100000 exceptions/month | — |
| feature flags requests | 1000000 requests/month | — |
| llm analytics events | 100000 events/month | — |
| logs gb | 50 GB/month | — |
| product analytics events | 1000000 events/month | — |
| projects | 1 projects | — |
| retention years | 1 year | — |
| session replay recordings | 5000 recordings/month | — |
| surveys responses | 1500 responses/month | — |
| team members | unlimited members | — |
Features
PostHog · 14 features
- A/B Testing — Experiments with significance analysis.
- Data Pipelines — Export events to BigQuery, Snowflake, S3.
- Data Warehouse — Query external sources (Stripe, Hubspot, S3) alongside events with SQL.
- Error Tracking — Sentry-style error tracking in same platform.
- Feature Flags — Rollout flags with targeting, A/B testing, JSON payloads.
- LLM Analytics — Tracing + cost tracking for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc.
- Logs — Centralized log ingest with free 50 GB/month.
- Product Analytics — Events, funnels, trends, retention, paths. SQL insights available.
- Revenue Tracking — Integration with Stripe for revenue + churn metrics.
- Self-Hosting — Docker/Helm. Full feature parity with cloud.
- Session Replay — Watch user sessions. Privacy controls, masked inputs, JS errors.
- SQL Query API — Run ClickHouse SQL over your events via API.
- Surveys — In-app surveys + feedback widgets.
- Workflows — Trigger emails/webhooks on events.
Grafana Cloud · 16 features
- Alloy (OTel agent) — Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector with Grafana additions.
- Application Platform — Infrastructure + k8s + frontend + cloud provider integrations.
- Beyla (eBPF auto-instrumentation) — Zero-code auto-instrumentation via eBPF for any language.
- Faro (RUM) — Frontend observability — traces, logs, Core Web Vitals.
- Grafana in Azure Marketplace — "Azure Managed Grafana" — Azure-native deployment.
- Grafana Incident — Incident management with Slack-native flows.
- Grafana OnCall — On-call scheduling + incident response (powered by Amixr).
- Grafana SLO — Service level objective tracking + error budget visualization.
- Grafana (visualization) — Dashboards, variables, alerting, annotations over any datasource.
- k6 (synthetic + load testing) — Load testing + synthetic monitoring. JavaScript-based scripts.
- Loki (logs) — Prometheus-inspired log aggregation with LogQL.
- Mimir (metrics) — Horizontally-scalable Prometheus-compatible TSDB.
- Pyroscope (profiling) — Continuous profiling (CPU, memory, etc.).
- Self-Host Option — Full OSS stack deployable in your infra.
- Tempo (traces) — High-scale distributed tracing with TraceQL.
- Unified Alerting — Grafana-native alerting across metrics, logs, traces.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | PostHog | Grafana Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | Grafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli |
| SDK | posthog-android, posthog-flutter, posthog-go, posthog-ios (Swift), posthog-js, posthog-node, posthog-php, posthog-python, posthog-react-native, posthog-ruby | Faro Web SDK (RUM) |
| REST | PostHog REST API | Grafana HTTP API, Loki Push API |
| MCP | PostHog MCP | — |
| OTHER | Webhooks + Actions | Prometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP |
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